It takes real bravery to speak against accepted good taste — and Salman Rushdie has waded right in

I still love Thomas Hardy. There, I've said it

Salman Rushdie sparked controversy on the Goodreads wesbite by giving poor ratings to classic novels (Getty Images)

There is a special adaptation of the drinking game “Never Have I Ever” that entertains literary types, and it’s called “Never Have I Ever Read…” So, one person pipes up that she’s never finished Ulysses, for instance, and everybody in the group who has read it has to down a drink. If the game is not well-balanced then some players will end up very embarrassed by their ignorance, but that won’t matter because all the really well-read ones won’t remember it come the morning.

There is an even more dangerous game that is seldom played, and that is called “Iconic Literature That I Just Can’t Stand”. Long-standing and loyal friendships have been lost when literary allegiances clash, so it takes a really brave reader to stand up and speak against tradition and accepted good taste. Sir Salman Rushdie has waded right in, however, in the very public forum of Goodreads reader reviews.

On Thursday, the novelist updated his personal “shelf” with 43 books that he has read, and rated each one from one to five. Poor Kingsley Amis (a friend of Rushdie’s old pal Christopher Hitchens) scores one star for Lucky Jim. V S Naipaul, despite a well-publicised and long-running feud with Rushdie (in which both liked to pretend not to have heard of each other) gets a five for A House for Mr Biswas. Perhaps more brutal are the threes: Money, by Martin Amis, three stars; To Kill A Mockingbird, a three!

Writers I know were scandalised. “Three stars for Money?” one said. “He may just be having a hissy fit.” Others have felt emboldened to admit their own unfashionable dislikes. Hating Middlemarch seems to be a common confession. So does giving up on Tristram Shandy. All right then, since we’re all being honest: I find P G Wodehouse completely unfunny, even though I know several of my colleagues who will shun me for saying so. What’s more, I still love Thomas Hardy, and I don’t care what any of you think about it.

Perhaps Sir Salman has done us all a favour, I thought, forcing friends to get this kind of thing out in the open. Knowing a loved one’s literary tastes is as revealing as knowing how they vote. Maybe we should all confess our personal taste atrocities in a spirit of openness and cooperation.

Then I heard Rushdie’s explanation: it was all a mistake, he wrote on Facebook on Friday. “I thought these rankings were a private thing designed to tell the site what sort of books to recommend to me, or not recommend. Turns out they are public….” Oops! Still, he concludes: “I don’t like the work of Kingsley Amis, there it is. I don’t have to explain or justify. It’s allowed.” He may well think so, but others are still horrified by his iconoclasm. I for one am just glad that he fessed up, before I got all over-sharing and started telling everyone how I really feel about magical realism….

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